Abstract

Who or what gets to be counted as human? This paper is a response to the questions raised by the idea of inhumanism, in particular, two papers in the e-flux Journal, editions #52 and #53, by the philosopher Reza Negaretsani, respectively, The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I and Part II: The Inhuman. In Part I, Negarestani addresses the paradox of orienting ourselves between the cultural tropes of humanism and anti-humanism, of operating via ‘consensus or dissensus’. In Part 2, Negarestani elaborates the commitment to a discursive inhumanism, one which requires rational agency to allow for the emergence of the human, albeit a speculative rationality which has the potential, to undergo a form of assimilation to an artificial, general intelligence, in which we ‘only become rational agents once we acknowledge or develop a certain intervening attitude toward norms that renders them binding’. Negrestani describes an augmented rationality which inhabits ‘the “area of maximum risk”—not risk to humanity per se, but to commitments which have not yet been updated, because they conform to a portrait of human that has not been revised’. The obvious question we are left with is whether the division between the human and the non-human is sustainable, and in asking this question, do we naturalise an ontology which always foregrounds humanism, even if it is filtered through an anti-humanist lens?